Sitrep

Today marks the publication of Dark State in paperback in the USA! And a price drop for the paperback in the UK—the UK first edition was a large format trade paperback, not a hardcover; this is the smaller "mass market" printing. (The ebook should also be getting a little cheaper by and by, but no new pricing has propagated yet.)

I've been quiet lately because we're going through a heat wave right now in the UK, and I'm a Discworld troll: if the temperature goes over 20 celsius in my un-air-conditioned office my brain melts. Also, I'm trying to take a sabbatical: I've been pushing out words faster than my natural long-term rate for a few years, and I don't generally take non-working holidays, and after a bit it all gets to be too much, with added close family medical woes on top. So, having turned in the manuscript of INVISIBLE SUN (which will be out next year, albeit no earlier than July and possibly as late as October) I'm giving myself license to do absolutely no scheduled work for six months, and see how it goes. And this is how it's going.

So far, it looks like my muse went on a month-long absinthe-guzzling bender and did too many 'shrooms. Not having to hit deadline quotas is good, but my subconscious keeps barfing up story notes, like:

Magical Girls often get their power as a gift from a goddess. Now imagine the goddess in question just happened to be Itzpapalotl. What sort of superpowers would Magical Girl Obsidian Heartbleed have ...?

(Over in The Other Blog We Do Not Speak Of there's even a running thread of regrettable supervillain ideas.)

Looking forward ...

"The Labyrinth Index" is in production and should be in shops and ebook stores by October 30th. "Invisible Sun" is with the editors, delayed, but will come out in 2019.

"Ghost Engine", the space opera, is my only project beyond that point that has a contractual delivery date: Orbit have bought it for the UK market and I need to deliver it in summer 2019. I wrote a complete first draft in 2017, but was forced to pause halfway through the redraft by my father's terminal illness. But it's a known quantity: I know what it's about, there's about 150,000 words of existing novel (albeit not in a publishable-as-is state), and it's going to happen. (There's no US publisher as yet because my agent and I haven't shopped it around because it isn't finished: don't worry, it's on the to-do list.)

So I'm now looking at what to do after "Ghost Engine". (Note: in case it isn't obvious, all prognostications are provisional: nothing is definite!)

First, the big news: I have spent the past 20 years juggling two vast long-term projects—the Merchant Princes and the Laundry Files. I'm now hitting my mid-fifties, and both these projects have on the order of a million words of continuity to keep track of and it's just too damned much.

Every story needs a beginning, a middle, and an end. So I'm beginning to work my way towards finding a satisfying end point for both those series, albeit one that doesn't preclude further work in either universe.

In the case of the Merchant Princes/Empire Games, that's relatively easy: "Invisible Sun" ends the current cycle. When I recover, there may be further books in that setting—but unlike previous MP/EG books, they'll be self-contained stand-alone stories that fit in a single book, rather than episodes in mind-buggeringly gigantic sagas. ("Merchant Princes", at 640,000 words, is longer than "The Lord of the Rings" or "War and Peace"; "Empire Games" isn't so much a trilogy as a novel in three installments, and weighs in at a mere 350,000 words, or about the same size of "Cryptonomicon". Please bear in mind that my best works turn out to be novellas, i.e. very long short stories or very short novels, of roughly 20-50,000 words ...)

Meanwhile, the Laundry is going in two different directions, at high speed.

Without spoilering "The Labyrinth Index" I think I can safely say that that book ends with an ongoing crisis that is inevitably going to ramp up to a series climax and a conclusion within another 2-4 books. I do not want to keep the series unfinished indefinitely. But I don't want to abandon the setting, either: it's too much fun. So what I'm aiming for right now (this is over a 3-5 year period, remember, and all long-term plans are subject to change) is to build a satisfying conclusion to the tale of Bob Howard, the Laundry, and CASE NIGHTMARE GREEN, while keeping the setting available for other spin-off stories. The Laundry Files are the workplace journals of various bureaucrats and agents working for SOE's X-Division; the Laundry universe is a recondite off-shoot of the urban fantasy genre that has room for vampires, elves, supervillains, yokai, kaiju, mad gods, even madder venture capitalists with extremely regrettable taste in software, and quite possibly Magical Girl Obsidian Heartbleed as well. The Laundry Files have a beginning, a middle, and, logically, an end: the Laundryverse, however, may well go on a lot longer (if my muse has anything to do with the matter—and, judging by the copious notes towards a non-Laundry Laundryverse novella he's been dictating through a megaphone this week, that's highly likely).

Aside from that ...?

Notes continue towards a third Scottish police procedural novel about technology-mediated crimes that don't exist yet, but I can't really get my teeth into it until the Brexit train wreck is concluded. Notes towards possible collaborations with [REDACTED] and [REDACTED] exist, along with media project [REDACTED].

As for my work/life balance, I'm going to see if I can change gear from trying (and sometimes failing) to push out a pair of 120,000 word novels every year, to successfully writing a single 120,000 word novel every year ... and one or two novellas which might or might not add up to the same word count. Which will mean more, rather than fewer, publication dates. Because I think I need to work smarter, not harder, if I plan to keep this up for another 20 years.